Anti-intellectualism is a load of waffle

The conservative elite encourage anti-intellectualism because it maintains an unsustainable status quo, writes Suzanne Harrington

STOP me if you’ve heard this before. Many years ago, the late comic genius, Bill Hicks, was in Tennessee in a waffle restaurant. He took out a book and began reading. ‘What are you reading for’? asked the waffle waitress. Not, ‘what are you reading?’, Hicks recounted, ‘but what are you reading FOR’? “I guess I read for a lot of reasons,” he said. “And the main one is that I don’t end up being a fuckin’ waffle waitress.” It’s probably just as well Hicks is dead, because the possibility of a waffle waitress running the White House would have killed him. Since his death, in 1994, a thick layer of stupidity has spread across the entire US, if not the whole of Western civilisation.

Or anti-intellectualism, as it’s politely known, defined as “a hostility or indifference to culture and intellectual reasoning,” says the Oxford Dictionary, but, then, who bothers with dictionaries anymore? Or any kind of books? Why read, when you have selfie sticks, Instagram, and reality TV?